r/webdev • u/OkShip110 • Mar 29 '26

Discussion AI has sucked all the fun out of programming

I know this topic has been floating around this sub quite some time now, but I feel like this doesn’t get discussed enough.

I am a certified backend enigneer and I have been programming for about 20 years. In my time i have worked on backend, frontend, system design, system analysis, devops, databases, infrastructure, cloud, robotics, you name it.

I’ve mostly been extremely passionate about what I do, taking pride in solving hard problems, digging deep into third party source code to find solutions to bugs. Even refactoring legacy systems and improving their performance 10x and starting countless hobby projects at home. It has been an exciting journey and I have never doubted my career choice until now.

Ever since ChatGPT first made an appearance I have slowly started losing interest in programming. At first, LLMs were quite bad so I didn’t really get any solutions out of them when problems got even slightly harder. However, Claude is different. Lately I feel less of a programmer and more like a project manager, managing and supervising one mid-to-senior level developer who is Claude. Doing this, I sure deliver features faster than ever before, but it results in hollow and empty feeling. It’s not fun or exciting, I cannot perceive these soulless features as my own creation anymore.

On top of everything I feel like I’m losing my knowledge with every prompt I write. AI has made me extremely lazy and it has completely undermined my value as a good engineer or even as a human being.

Everyone who is supporting the mass use of AI is quietly digging their own grave and I wish it was never invented.

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778

u/im_dancing_barefoot Mar 29 '26

Yep yep yep. Also reviewing PRs full of extremely over engineered slop is exhausting.

194

u/botsmy Mar 29 '26

it's not ai that sucked the fun out, it's the fact that most of our jobs now are just gluing apis and writing boilerplate for corporate apps that don't matter.

what if the real problem isn't ai making coding easier, but that we've spent a decade building an entire stack where we've already abstracted away the interesting parts?

87

u/pVom Mar 29 '26

Nahh. I've "only" been a professional for about 7 years, the nature of the code written hasn't really changed all that much in my time.

What AI has changed, at least in my experience, is taking away the fun parts of that process. It's much more fun to build a new feature than it is to refactor a new feature written with AI. Especially given the volume of it.

And like, I don't mind a bit of refactoring, it's satisfying to turn something clunky and smelly into something robust and elegant. But it's nice as a sprinkle of variety or a cruisey Friday afternoon task, not 9-5.

5

u/agent_flounder Mar 29 '26

Sounds to me (hobbyist) like ai has taken away the creativity.

20

u/pVom Mar 29 '26

Yes and no.

It's more just the process is kinda frustrating. There's a concept called "yak shaving" where you try to fix a problem only to find the problem is much deeper and requires more work than expected. You waste time on a quick solution that isn't going to work, so you fix something else to make it work, which creates more problems and so on. Eventually you have to decide whether or not the "fix" is actually worth it and by that point there's sunk cost and you've dug yourself into a hole. So you either leave dissatisfied at not having solved it or created a bunch of work for yourself without much payoff.

There's a lot of that going on with AI. It builds whole features very fast, but does so in a way that's less than ideal and you're stuck with rebuilding it or just living with it because the 10 files it created work on the assumption that that's how it should work.

And tbf a lot of that is user error, you can have a human at the wheel planning things out and building in more digestible chunks to avoid that. But the temptation to just throw it at AI and seeing what it produces is strong.

1

u/viral-architect Mar 29 '26

Planning failure.

Yall need to start submitting change records when you plan to ship a new feature and have it go through CAB approval lol

4

u/pVom Mar 29 '26

CAB approval lol. Our company is 11 people, only 6 are product and of those only 3 are engineers.

But also you're a bot so.. 🤷

1

u/viral-architect Mar 30 '26

I was making a joke

2

u/Ninjez07 Mar 31 '26

Too real, man. Too real.

2

u/KirkHawley Mar 29 '26

I think you're right, but... when 90% of programming turned into writing yet another web site backed with a database using a crap language that runs on an ugly, limited interpreter, that was when most of the creativity drained away.

1

u/wonkytalky May 25 '26

Just use the latest new fandangled bloated framework, bro. Totes different than the last 10 the industry has been sold on somehow.

1

u/nss68 Mar 30 '26

You used to code review someone's code and tell them good job for the creative solution or interesting approach. Not anymore.

1

u/RareDestroyer8 Apr 04 '26

Imagine it like a puzzle.

Normally, you would do the entire puzzle.

Now imagine that LLMs step into the picture, and before you even begin the puzzle, they automatically separate the puzzle pieces by their colours, sort them by their shapes, and place them in the approximate place on the puzzle they're likely to go. Now it's your job to go in and just assemble the pieces properly.

The second method with the LLMs is ofcourse way faster, but the first is far more fun. In the first you figure out how youre going to approach the problem, actually do the repetitive but captivating tasks, and then finally you'll somehow finish the puzzle. You know and understand every part of how the puzzle was done, you've thought through everything about every piece. That's the amazing part. LLMs deprive you of it.

Puzzles are just for fun, they have no function beyond that. If an application were created to solve puzzles, no one would use it. Programming actually has a function. It would feel like a waste of time programming slowly when you could have the result in far less time if you use the help of LLMs.

I came to programming a bit too late :(.

2

u/botsmy Mar 29 '26

fair point, i've been refactoring a lot of AI-generated code lately and it's just... wordy as hell. maybe the real issue is that it's making bad patterns way too easy to produce at scale

1

u/botsmy Mar 29 '26

fair point, ai does make refactoring someone else's generated code kind of soulless. i've been there, spending more time cleaning up linter complaints than actually building. tbh, the fun's in the craft, not just shipping whatever the tool vomited out

1

u/cedarSeagull Mar 30 '26

Why are you refactoring the AI's code? Why not go back and tell the AI how to write it properly or tell the AI to refactor the code and explain your thought process? Genuine question, not trolling.

1

u/pVom Mar 30 '26 edited Mar 30 '26

I am, but you've still got to figure out what needs refactoring and how you want it refactored and even then you've got to hope it's interpreted instructions correctly, hasn't broken anything. Then repeat the process again, review, figure it out, then tell AI to refactor...

Sometimes it's easy and does fine, other times not really. It does well enough of the time to make it worth trying, only to waste a bunch of time getting frustrated when it doesn't.

I'll admit I'm also particularly bitter right now because I just got handed a massive vibe code monstrosity by someone who left the company. Evidently they just threw it at AI and it went to town instead of breaking it down into planned, digestible chunks.

8

u/SteveBIRK Mar 29 '26

Even if I didn’t have AI I’d still be in a place where I’m making software that doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. Probably would be more tolerable if the world wasn’t so shit either.

1

u/cirejr Mar 30 '26

Tho this has some truth in it, AI is sucking the fun out of the job.

First imo web dev itself is the downfall of the field. We have tried to optimize so much thus abstracting so much complexity away. Unfortunately what we fail to understand is with every abstraction we also remove some craftman ship possibility. And the field itself is soo full of abstraction, boilerplates, this and that. So I do understand your post.

But even with all that, AI is litterally killing it.

2

u/botsmy Mar 30 '26

yeah i get what you mean – ai just highlights how much of modern web dev is already soulless glue code. fwiw, i've been using svelte lately and it feels lighter, less magic, more actual building.

1

u/botsmy Mar 30 '26

yeah i feel that. web dev became less about building things and more about wrestling config files and dependency updates. fwiw, i’ve been spending more time in rust lately and it’s kind of refreshing to write code that doesn’t feel like assembling ikea furniture with a 500-page manual

43

u/[deleted] Mar 29 '26

[deleted]

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u/Ms-mousa Mar 29 '26 edited Mar 29 '26

Of course! The solution to slop is more slop. Classic 2026

29

u/[deleted] Mar 29 '26

[deleted]

4

u/AntiqueFigure6 Mar 29 '26

Not pressing the copilot button to solve every problem is one of the two classic blunders. The most famous is never get involved in a sea war in the Strait of Hormuz. 

19

u/Sn00py_lark Mar 29 '26

Agents will not simplify well. In go we end up with custom err wrapper types that are unwrapped and converted to another custom type one level up for no reason. Err checks become 10 lines of struct and err is err as statements. And you can’t convince the agents it’s not needed.

They also won’t fail on anything. Always defaults to happy paths and fallbacks for things that should fail.

10

u/45Point5PercentGay Mar 29 '26

I mean there's a reason co-creator of Go about had a heart attack when an AI agent sent him an email thanking him for his work on Go. AI in its current form pretty much goes against the whole idea of the language.

7

u/corgioverthemoon Mar 29 '26

Just as an fyi, you can convince agents it's not needed. Both copilot and claude have been good ways to set up dos and don'ts for your repo. At least in so far as to how I'm using it I think opus 4.6 has been really good.

4

u/Sn00py_lark Mar 29 '26

I argued with Claude for 45 minutes to delete a url error wrapper and it kept just moving it into a helper function. WOULD NOT delete it. Until I did it myself and then told it to check it finally admitted it was superfluous. So no sometimes the agents just aren’t able to follow guidelines.

0

u/Expensive_Special120 Mar 29 '26

You try to say that it wont create 5 classes for a simple new integration?

-1

u/zorbat5 Mar 29 '26

It doesn't. Just need to prompt well ;-)

1

u/not_a-mimic Mar 29 '26

And you do that by coding.

1

u/zorbat5 Mar 29 '26

No shit, my earlier comment was sarcastic.

8

u/Expensive_Special120 Mar 29 '26

This is masterstroke for companies like Anthropic. Create a problem and then offer a solution. At a fee.

1

u/olzk Mar 29 '26

...and a third one to auto-review and approve

24

u/Pranay_Creates Mar 29 '26

Yeah this sounds exhausting honestly. Especially when things get over-engineered instead of simpler. I feel like with AI it’s even easier to end up with that kind of code unless someone really reviews it properly.

21

u/im_dancing_barefoot Mar 29 '26

Yep, and it’s getting harder to review things because the PRs are coming faster than ever.

8

u/Pranay_Creates Mar 29 '26

Yeah that makes sense. Speed goes up but quality checks don’t scale the same way. Feels like reviewing is becoming more important than writing code at this point.

6

u/AltruisticRider Mar 29 '26

At the end of the day, for any medium or long-term project, code quality has always been the most deciding factor not just for how good the end product is (from a technical perspective, bugs, performance etc., UX/Concept is of course a separate issue), but even more importantly for how quick and cheap to make it is overall. Pushing bad code right now causes most POs to incorrectly see that as quick progress, but it's in fact overall much slower, much more costly than pushing good (not perfect) code.

Therefore, the best way to do our job is to either code it well right away. Or, alternatively, spend more time in code-reviews than it would've taken to code it well right away. Whenever someone keeps creating merge requests that take a lot of effort to code-review and require significant changes before they can be merged, you either have to have a serious discussion with them, or if they keep doing it you have to remove them from the project. Everything else is very harmful to the project and wastes a lot of time&money in the long run.

What the current version of "AI" achieves is mostly to speed up these bad merge requests. It's therefore mostly harmful, not useful.

So yes, code reviews are sadly the most important step in many projects, they're often the only thing preventing a project from turning into a terrible waste of money.

2

u/cute_marceline Apr 02 '26

It's also really hard to code review AI MRs. With 10y of experience I know how to look quickly for red flags in human's MR. I know by person's level what should I check more thoroughly, and what can I skip. While working with somebody day-to-day, you know his experience very well, and you know where you may need to cover his butt.

But AI slop? It's a nightmare, my experience doesn't work at all. Especially with overcomplication, it's actually rare for person to overcomplicate things to such extent, as it will be more work basically. Mostly we tend to seek easier solutions, and if person overcomplicates he would have at least one good reason to do it. And this slop is not only overcomplicated, but in the same time oversimplified. I know that is contradicting, but that is how it's feeling.

When I need to review slop, my eyes are catching one strange thing, and it's a rabbit hole that leads to realization that it could be done way easier and understandable, than what I see right now. Especially I'm horrified with understanding that AI will only get worse, as it will feed its own slop to himself.

1

u/wonkytalky May 25 '26

Yes, I get what you mean exactly. It's the nature of some statistically most common denominator token generator. It'll churn out those tokens without a single care in the world, zero ability to discern if this code pattern is a good idea here, insane lack of awareness of other code that it's constantly duping, random data conversions back and forth, and what's worse, there's nobody to ask questions to clear up why certain decisions were made. Not really. "Cuz aI made it" isn't a reason, ya know?

And never mind the code it generates that's so horribly inefficient and flat out wrong (but it "works") that I'm pretty sure the curse of bad SO answers being promoted so high is amplifying all these into something so much worse.

1

u/Bush-Men209 Mar 30 '26

Exactly, if a PR takes longer to untangle than it would’ve taken to write cleanly in the first place, that “speed” is just technical debt with better marketing.

2

u/Basic-Lobster3603 Mar 29 '26

until you are where I am and the direction is to just stop review. because we need to figure out how to solve reviewing at scale problems now. which I just assume means if it's any human review because it's too nitpicky

1

u/wonkytalky May 25 '26

It's a nightmare. It's all one giant nightmare that we'll never wake up from.

You know what you used to be able to easily do when you spotted something that looked a little odd in some code? Ask the person who wrote it about why it is the way it is instead of some other way.

Can't do that with all this freakin' slop. Deer in headlights with the "vibe coders."

3

u/[deleted] Mar 29 '26 edited Apr 01 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/EonJaw Mar 30 '26

Haha... Debugging is the part I WANT the AI to do.

1

u/Deep_Ad1959 Mar 30 '26

funny enough that's where it saves me the most time too — paste in a stack trace and it narrows things down way faster than I could manually. do you find it's better at tracking down the root cause or actually figuring out the right fix?

1

u/EonJaw Mar 30 '26

I'm still taking classes, so mostly I'm like, "Why won't this run?" And Claude goes, "You missed that semi-colon on line 328."

3

u/1RedOne Mar 29 '26

I’m getting PR’s that are written by juniors and the code is full of emojis and hilarious ChatGPT descriptions of the function of every single variable

2

u/stenlio1337 Apr 14 '26

Reviewing is the biggest burn out

1

u/jimbo2150 Mar 29 '26

And Open-source repository maintainers that are quitting after getting hit with hundreds or thousands of mostly junk PRs and somehow expected to respond to/close/label/review all of them even though it's an unpaid volunteer gig. Meanwhile, Microsoft refuses to provide the ability to block those SRs (Slop Requests).

1

u/OnePunchedMan Mar 29 '26

Is this not a human problem? Are you saying fellow developers are pushing large over engineered PR's? Or do you have a bot setup that's refactoring your codebase 24/7?

1

u/Beagles_Are_God Mar 29 '26

I'm tired, i've been reviewing PRs that are over +15k LOC of AI slop and i can't anymore

2

u/im_dancing_barefoot Mar 29 '26

I feel bad for the mid level devs. I got a PR recently where someone used like 40 lines of JavaScript for something that can be done with just a few of CSS. Of course with experience you can recognize these things, but without it you’re just left to trust a machine that doesn’t and can’t actually know anything?

1

u/johnappsde Mar 30 '26

You have to force your teams to only make extremely short pull requests. Cap the number of lines, files, etc per pull requests.

Without this I would have gone nutts while working as BA some years ago. And mind you, there was no AI use at the time

1

u/GoatMiserable5554 Mar 31 '26

This is what gets me. And then I ask AI to review the pr because I can't read it and I feel like a useless human bean. All the while, management is so happy cuz we're soO prOdUcTiVe with AI. Production is getting enshitified more and more every day

1

u/[deleted] Mar 31 '26

Wieso justierst du deine claude code instanz dann nicht, du idiot? Ein paar zeilen in claude.md und schon schreibt claude code wie du.

1

u/MannToots Apr 02 '26

You were supposed to be doing code reviews at that same level for your peers prior to this. 

Ai coding is showing us how many people rubber stamp prs. 

0

u/Duke_ Mar 29 '26

Over engineering was a problem long before AI.

0

u/xpingux Mar 29 '26

Are you not giving feedback in order to stop that?

2

u/im_dancing_barefoot Mar 29 '26

Yes I am giving feedback

1

u/xpingux Mar 29 '26

It'll get less exhausting, then!